The Grizzly Years : Books: After Vietnam, Doug Peacock couldn’t talk to anyone--except grizzly bears. His new work tells how they helped him reenter society.

The man roaming a roadside meadow in Glacier National Park looked more like a low-rent tourist than a legend. But, despite the $2 tennis shoes, cheap purple sunglasses, threadbareshorts and tropical print shirt, the real tourists were not fooled.

A Honda slowed and stopped in the middle of the road.

“Are you Doug Peacock?” the young man in the driver’s seat asked. Peacock nodded as he jokingly scouted the Honda’s interior for beer.

“So, are you really a madman?” the tourist asked, handing over a can of Oly with a star-struck grin.

To young men who toil in offices but dream of manly valor, Doug Peacock is the ultimate role model. A former Green Beret medic in Vietnam, Peacock has spent much of the last 20 years living with grizzly bears. There are few, if any, men or women who can match his intimate acquaintance with wild grizzlies.

What’s more, Peacock is the model for “Hayduke,” a character in the notorious novel “The Monkey Wrench Gang,” written by his friend, the late Edward Abbey. In Abbey’s book--a major influence in the birth of the radical environmental movement--Hayduke is a Vietnam veteran who turns his rage and skill with explosives to the task of saving the planet. A volatile, inarticulate brute, obsessed with bodily functions and blowing up dams, Hayduke was the prototype for Earth First! eco-terrorists.

Although Peacock is demure on the subject of his fictional counterpart, the two are clearly considered by many to be one and the same.

For instance, Outside Magazine called Peacock “a legendary celebrity of anti-development politics.” And the Montana essayist William Kittredge says Peacock is “a legendary environmental warrior.”

The Peacock myth is bound to grow with the recent release of his book “Grizzly Years” (Henry Holt & Co., $22.95), an account of the author’s years spent befriending and defending grizzlies in the back country of Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks.

The book is not so much about macho heroics (although the death-defying encounters in Vietnam and grizzly country are vivid), but about redemption.

When Peacock left his parents’ Michigan home and drove his Jeep West in 1968, no tourist would have dared shake his hand.

Just back from Vietnam, he was weapon-laden and “frenzied on the inside.” He admits to smashing a TV set in a motel room and to blasting a phone booth with a shotgun when it failed to refund his change.

For two years, Peacock didn’t talk to anyone. “I found it easier to talk to bears than priests,” he wrote. “I had no talent for reentering society.”

His mother, Kathryn Peacock, said Doug was an outgoing and adventurous child who had spent hours hunting for arrowheads and Indian relics in the Michigan lake country where he grew up. At the University of Michigan, where he earned a degree in geology, he was a popular, bright student, she said.

“But when Doug came back from Vietnam, he was just no good,” she said. “He was in a drunken stupor most of the time. He just had to be deadened.”

It wasn’t until reading “Grizzly Years,” she said, that she and her husband understood “how bad things were for him” in Vietnam.

In an instinctive move toward healing, Peacock headed for “the blank places on the map.” Thinking about unpopulated wilderness regions was what had sustained him in Vietnam, he said. In “Grizzly Years,” he described how he would reach for his map of the northern Rockies after a day of caring for the wounded and dying.

Drinking bourbon while the blood dried on his clothes, he would study the map by penlight, concentrating until he was able to imagine himself in the hidden basins and meadows of Wyoming and Montana.

When Peacock did make it to the mountains and found grizzly bears there, the element of danger suited his mood. “If something wasn’t a matter of life and death, I just wasn’t there anymore,” he said.

His first encounter with the bears came when he was soaking in a Yellowstone hot spring, weak from the aftermath of an attack of malaria, an illness he had contracted in Vietnam.

He spotted a mother grizzly and two cubs, and frantically clawed his way up a small lodgepole pine. (Peacock does not recommend climbing trees to escape grizzlies, by the way. He was a novice at the time.)

Peacock said he cowered naked in the tree “like some large species of silly bird” until the grizzly family moved on.

Although shivering with cold, fear and sickness, Peacock climbed down the tree a healthier man, cured of obsessive dreams and flashbacks of the war.

“Now that I realized real grizzlies lurked in the shadows, my dreams were not so important,” he wrote. “For the first time since returning to the world, my thoughts chose themselves without Vietnam intruding.”

The next time a grizzly was close enough to kill him--but didn’t--Peacock put away his guns. “My shooting days were over,” he said.

Over the next two decades, traveling with a 100-pound pack and cheap Army surplus gear, Peacock would spend most of the spring and fall months camped in grizzly habitat. “The bears were the center of my world and all my activities were structured around their movements,” he wrote.

The highlight of each pilgrimage to the mountains was the first sighting of the bear Peacock has referred to as his Moby Dick, “the baddest bear in the mountains.” Also known as The Black Grizzly, it was the only bear Peacock ever felt was out to hurt him. At one point, The Black Grizzly made its disgust for humans known by ripping apart Peacock’s camp and eating one of his T-shirts.

Through such encounters, Peacock developed his own guidelines for surviving in bear country, rules that sometimes contradict those listed in National Park Service handouts. For instance, he said, “bear bells are obscene.” The small silver bells sold in national park gift shops and intended to warn off bears are an irritant to the bears and all other creatures, Peacock said.

When rounding a blind bend in bear habitat, he suggested, try talking or singing quietly.

Peacock also learned never to run or try to climb a tree once a bear had spotted him. Peacock said he lived through many close calls by striking a pose halfway between dominance and submission. He’d stand his ground but talk quietly to let the bear know he meant no trouble: “Hey grizzer bear, it’s only me . . . sure hate to bother you. . . .” (The October issue of Backpacker Magazine contains more of Peacock’s tips on traveling safely in grizzly country.)

As Peacock learned to coexist with the bears, he began to grow outraged by their fate. Once common throughout the West, grizzly bears have been routinely exterminated so that, today, there are only six pockets of the bears existing in the lower 48 states. Only two of those--in the Yellowstone and Glacier areas--are viable populations.

“If we are to succeed in saving grizzlies with all their wildness, we will not do it by changing the bears to meet our needs,” Peacock wrote. “For the first time in our relatively short history on this planet, we will have to be the ones to bend.”

In 1975, Peacock began filming grizzly bears, hoping it would help him plead the bears’ case. He started showing the films and lecturing around the country about the decline of the grizzly; he continues to be in demand as a speaker on grizzlies.

The bears’ effect on Peacock over the years is unmistakable; his effect on them is harder to measure.

Although his perseverance in studying grizzlies has earned him grudging respect from some bear biologists and other professionals, Peacock said his self-taught style also has caused some experts to discount him.

Chris Servheen, grizzly bear recovery coordinator for the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said it bothers him when people take Peacock’s observations as scientific fact. “He’s not a scientist; he’s not a biologist,” Servheen said.

Yet, Servheen does give Peacock credit as a bear philosopher: “I have a lot of respect for his feelings about bears.”

The emotional perspective is Peacock’s great contribution to the bear debate, said his friend Douglas Chadwick, a Montana naturalist and writer. “He publicizes bears from a point of view others haven’t: the bear as a healer and a teacher.”

Peacock says what distinguishes him from the hordes of bear researchers is he’s had “the leisure of watching bears at their leisure.” His self-imposed exile allowed him to spend countless hours in close proximity with the same bears, season after season.

As a result, Peacock has been privy to behavior often overlooked by researchers who spend a lot of their time tracking radio-collared bears from airplanes and helicopters.

Among his discoveries: Grizzly bears like to play. One of Peacock’s favorite bears was dubbed Happy Bear for his insatiable appetite for fun. Peacock has watched as Happy Bear blew bubbles in a muddy pond, just so the grizzly could have the pleasure of popping the bubbles with his teeth and claws.

Play for its own sake reflects a “complex consciousness,” Peacock said. A grizzly bear that blows bubbles cannot simply be dismissed as a “fearful, dark creature of the night,” the role grizzlies have often played in Western lore and literature.

After a two-day solo backpack, Peacock hiked off the mountain one recent morning into the town of Polebridge. Intense and excitable as usual, he was eager to describe what he’d seen--one grizzly cub and three adult bears, among other things.

Peacock is a compact, comfortably disheveled man, with powerful calves and an innocent smile. People are forever comparing him to a grizzly bear, specifically a dominant male.

The author ripped open a brown garbage bag and dumped his treasures from the mountains on a picnic table in front of the Polebridge Mercantile. With a large cooking knife, Peacock began trimming the stems off a pile of moss-coated chanterelle mushrooms he’d picked that morning.

The mushrooms were a gift for his friend Karen Feather, proprietor of the Northern Lights Saloon in Polebridge. Feather said she thought Peacock was “just a noisy blowhard” when she first met him 10 years ago.

But now, they’re friends. His loudness comes from sheer built-in volume, she discovered, not arrogance.

The gift of chanterelle mushrooms has become a Peacock trademark, an emblem of generosity. He’s always cooking someone a wild mushroom bisque, using his medic training to patch up a friend’s backwoods injury or trading contacts with writer pals.

The anti-social outlaw of the ‘70s has been replaced by the considerate, gregarious, well-adjusted 48-year-old Peacock of today. Shades of Hayduke survive, though. He is still spooked by helicopters and is given to such eccentricities as brushing his teeth in moving vehicles.

Once a hermit, Peacock now has a secure circle of friends among well-known writers and outdoorsmen, including Yvon Chouinard, David Quammen, Peter Matthiessen, Jim Harrison and Earth First! figurehead Dave Foreman. He was close friends with Ed Abbey before Abbey’s death last year.

Karen Feather said people gravitate to Peacock because “bears represent the wild and he represents the bear.”

And, in trying to explain the Peacock mystique, Douglas Chadwick said: “He has a larger life than a lot of people.”

Peacock’s wife, Lisa, and two small children live in Tucson, where Peacock spends part of the year trying to live up to fatherhood. Making a living has been a struggle. For years, Peacock supported himself by part-time work as a fire tower lookout.

“I’m good in an absolute crisis, lousy at everyday life,” he said, commenting on his domestic deficiencies.

Between family, friends and writing projects, Peacock barely has time these days to make his seasonal pilgrimage to grizzly country.

Each fall, though, when the huckleberries ripen, he’s still compelled to travel north. But his calendar is no longer marked by such events as the first sighting of the bear that ate his T-shirt.

The grizzly years may be coming to an end; but, as a popular bumper sticker attests: Hayduke Lives.